“Can I do that? You can do whatever you want”: My conversation with Hollay Ghadery on her poetry collection “Rebellion Box”
Hollay Ghadery (pictured above) holds Rebellion Box, which was published in 2023 by Radiant Press.
In this part of my conversation with Hollay Ghadery, we examine her poetry collection Rebellion Box (2023). We discuss the historical inspiration for the title poem, how the collection came together, and some of the poems and poets she loves most.
What's the Idea: When did you start writing your next book, Rebellion Box?
Hollay Ghadery: Rebellion Box had many failed incarnations beforehand, but then I went to a lecture series at the Uxbridge Historical Society when my second child was just a baby. Allan McGillivray, who's a local historian, was talking about Joseph Gould, who is the founder of Uxbridge. He was talking about Joseph Gould's involvement in the rebellion of 1837. I don't remember what possessed me to go to this lecture. It's not that I'm not a massive history nerd. Okay, I guess I am. I worked at Black Creek Pioneer Village and I loved it. But I don't know why I would have taken an infant at night to this thing. But I did, and I was really fascinated by the story.
“He all sent these letters that were deeply hopeful and then I thought, what do I have in common with this old dead white guy? I’ve felt scared and trapped, but I also feel this hope in my life. Maybe a little like Joseph.”
He was telling us about Joseph Gould being a pacifist and a Quaker and how he got wrapped up in the rebellion and got imprisoned in Fort Henry. And while there, Joseph carved a tiny little box out of stove wood and engraved something on it. He sent it home to a woman who ended up being the mother of his wife. He was very infatuated with a girl named Mary but because they were Quakers, and the propriety standards at the time meant he couldn't write directly to her, especially not from prison, so he had to send correspondence to Mary's mom. So he sent these letters back and forth and it was a way of communicating with Mary without directly communicating with Mary.
I started to think about how lonely and scared he must be. I mean, people were being executed all around him. And again, he's a pacifist. He wanted to end colonial rule and he wanted a different life for people. He wasn't there because of violence. He was just arrested for being at the right place at the wrong time. But he all sent these letters that were deeply hopeful and then I thought, what do I have in common with this old dead white guy? I’ve felt scared and trapped, but I also feel this hope in my life. Maybe a little like Joseph. And so I started writing the piece “Rebellion Box”, which is a sestina. It won The New Quarterly's Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest when the book was already accepted for publication. It was also rejected hundreds of times before thatd because I wrote it in 2012 and this book came out in 2021. But that was kind of the heart of the collection, that poem, which was feeling terrified and saying, I'm gonna go on and try and envision a future that I want to live in and try to work towards doing that, even though I'm scared and I'm trapped and I'm terrified.
What's the Idea: It’s amazing that you found inspiration from that unexpected evening. Did you write the rest of the poems after “Rebellion Box” or did you take from your back catalog?
Hollay: Some of them were from my back catalog, but I have an extensive catalog of completely unpublishable and embarrassing poems that will never see the light of day, so I didn't really have that much of a catalog.
People have a lot of opinions about MFAs and whether they're worth it or not. For me, it absolutely was worth it. I had amazing instructors and I learned a lot from my classmates and it helped me think about poetry differently and what I wanted my poetry to do and what it meant to me and the amount that you could play with poetry. I mean, I'm still learning.
Rebellion Box was the culmination of over a decade of writing and experimenting with poetry. This collection embraces her everyday realities, including motherhood, vulnerability, and rage.
One of the things that unlocked a recent poem for me was reading Kyle Flemmer's Supergiants, which was just published by the wonderful Hamilton publisher Wolsak & Wynn. Kyle plays so much with visual poetry. There's poems in his collection about the lunar flag that have blacked out spaces that look like the craters that would have torn through the lunar flag. After reading that poem of his, I realized what was holding me back was thinking this poem had to be this left orientated thing and that's not what it was supposed to be. And as soon as I let myself occupy the whole stage of the page, I could suddenly write this poem that had been just stuck for so long.
And with Rebellion Box, I started the process of playing. I am in no way, shape, or form embarrassed the collection exists, but just like Fuse, it is very much a time capsule of where I was and what I was thinking about at the time. When I look at it now, I'm like, I would have changed this or that. But that's also doing a disservice to the editors and the publishers who published it and saw the merit as it was. So I try not to be dismissive of myself because in being dismissive of my own work, I'm dismissing every single person who believed in me and in my book and actually invested money and time into these poems. So I won't go down that route.
What's the Idea: Was it important to you to return to poetry after writing your memoir or was it a result of the inspiration from writing “Rebellion Box”?
“I read a lot of poetry at the time, which is I think the best way to write better poetry. And it’s not that I was reading it thinking, I’m going to do that. But I think when you read poetry, it just kind of unlocks something in your brain and it encourages you to be playful.”
Hollay: I was trying to publish a book of poetry long before Fuse, and that would have been Rebellion Box in its earliest incarnations, though I don't even know what I called it. But it was not getting any traction at all, just rejection after rejection, so it languished for a very long time. And then Rebellion Box came to fruition.
I look back at the collection of poems and I saw the problem on a craft level. I think maybe two poems that were from that original one made it to the final one, and they made it with massive edits and overhauling. So, I really had to just abandon the original thing and be like, "That's not working."
There's a wonderful podcast called Writers Read Their Early sh*t by Jason Emde. I got to read some of my terrible poetry on that and I feel like I gave them their day in the sun by acknowledging my underripe work then because you need to do the underripe stuff. It's just necessary.
What's the Idea: That’s the only way to grow. What was the final timeline to write this project once you were inspired?
Hollay: Once I started really focusing on it and abandoned the old project, it took maybe a year or two. I was writing in tandem with somebody else and we were editing each other's poems and sending poems back and forth. So, I think I felt really inspired to keep pace with this person. Shout out to Margo LaPierre. She has an incredible collection called Ajar coming out with Guernica Editions. She is one of my top five favourite poets of all time. I cannot wait for that collection to blow people's minds.
I was writing in tandem with this genius, so I felt like I better get my shit together. I read a lot of poetry at the time, which is I think the best way to write better poetry. And it's not that I was reading it thinking, I'm going to do that. But I think when you read poetry, it just kind of unlocks something in your brain and it encourages you to be playful and it encourages you to put words together that don't usually go together. And poetry especially has a way of silencing my inner editor in the first drafts. I needed to stop that voice from telling me don’t do that, you can't do that.
What's the Idea: What other collections or poets inspired you?
Ghadery’s poem “The 13th Step,” was published in Rebellion Box. It’s posted here with permission from the author.
Hollay: There's tons. I love Bronwen Wallace. Khashayar Mohammadi is phenomenal. He's a translator as well. Michael Frazier is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful poet. Tolu Oloruntoba, another incredible poet. Lorna Goodison, loved her. I'm a fan of Keats, too. He's old school, but I think we're all allowed one old school poet. It's Shakespeare for some people, but for me, it's Keats. I love that he was so tragic about it. It speaks to me. He's like, “Everybody's doomed. Nothing matters. I'm just going to write these beautiful poems.” I love that about him. Sarah Venart’s collection I Am the Big Heart, which came out with Brick Books, was just incredible. There’s so much poetry that I love.
What's the Idea: Thanks for sharing that incredible list. How else did your idea for the poetry collection change?
Hollay: At first I had it in three sections for some weird reason. I don't know if I read something at the time that had sections, but that got removed so it's just all poems. I even have a poem in the collection, “Cosmic Script,” which is about living with existential OCD, that's a riff. It’s the same title as one of the parts of my non-fiction book that I then turned into a poem because I loved it so much. I was like, can I do that? You can do whatever you want, it’s your own work. You're plagiarizing yourself. That doesn't exist. So I did that, which was a fun experiment to explore some of the same words even, but in a slightly different way.
A lot changed about it. I stopped trying to make it speak to big worldly issues, whatever those are, and I leaned into motherhood and the domestic and all the stuff that is arguably more important than anything else because the domestic is where we all start and it's what shapes us all. I think that it reaffirmed that I have to stop and I have to fight against people who dismiss domestic writing and dismiss women's writing as only domestic because not only does it happen to be what I write about mostly, but it's certainly not only domestic. It really made me stand behind my own work more and be like, okay, just because I'm writing a poem about being a mom doesn't mean that poem is going to suck.
I don't know if it's something that the general world has, but I certainly had this impression that writing about feminine things was frivolous. It’s fine to embroider on a tea towel in your kitchen some pithy little phrase about being a mom, but other than that it's worthless. I think finishing Rebellion Box, which is really focused on the rebellion, the rage, the activity, the emotion, the strength, the furiousness and the beauty and the love and all of that stuff. It made me feel a lot more secure and powerful about just staying in the lane that I want to occupy and owning it.
What's the Idea: Writers are always encouraged to write what they know, but then you're dismissed if you write something that's too familiar. They always find a reason to dismiss women’s issues, movies, literature, and so on.
Hollay: I don't find it strange. I know why I had that belief going in. But interestingly, one of the poems that I get asked to read the most out of that collection when I'm reading somewhere and someone is already familiar with that collection, they'll ask me to read “Search History.” And I'm like, is it just because you want to embarrass me that you want me to read this poem? I could say it's the speaker’s search history, but it is one hundred percent my search history. And once you've written a memoir like I have, I don't think that you really care too much about this kind of thing. I've given birth to four kids and had 20 people in the room with me. It's whatever. We'll just talk about this stuff.
Ghadery reads from Rebellion Box at a public event.
But “Search History” is my kind of middle finger to people who want me to be well behaved and who want me to think in ways and behave in ways and live in ways that I won't. I was just searching for something one night and then my search history came up and I was like, holy shit, you are unhinged. This is awesome. So I took it down and that is actually just my search history. I think that my search history gives a better idea of who I am than maybe even a few poems. It's very telling. That goes back to how much you can play and have fun with poems.
What's the Idea: You mentioned the poem that other people ask you to read. What poems do you like to pick? Is there a poem that is most meaningful to you?
Hollay: I love “Psychomachia”, but it's also one of the longest poems in the book, so I don't tend to read it out loud often. It's also the only thing I've ever written that's been published in The Malahat Review. Mind you, I don't tend to submit to The Malahat a lot because a girl can only have her heart broken so many times.
“Psychomachia” is a poem about being a mom but also still containing all these multitudes that you have. For people who don't know, psychomachia is like when you have the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. It's a battle of your souls. For those of us who have seen The Emperor's New Groove and there's two Kronks, that's it. The battle of these opposing sides of yourself and in the case of motherhood, maybe they're not opposing at all. I think when we just subscribe to this narrow definition of what a mother should be, then sure, it's going to look like we're warring with ourselves, but really, I'm a mom, but I'm also a ton of other things.
I also like to read “Braids”. It’s another form poem that's a lot of fun to read. I wrote that in my MFA, one of the two that made it into Rebellion Box.
What's the Idea: I love how the collection mixes personal stories with a piece like “Rebellion Box,” which stood out to me because of how different the place and person was. Constructing the other pieces around it was an interesting choice.
Hollay: I think it's the only time I've ever written a man convincingly. I was so focused on his humanity, so he wasn't a caricature to me. He was just a person. And with Widow Fantasies, I really struggled with the one story that's semi narrated by a man (“audience as patio furniture”). Technically the patio furniture is narrating it, but I struggle with writing men, and then I have to think back sometimes and remember to just go with the ”Rebellion Box” approach. Just stop turning these poor men into caricatures because you're hurt and you're tired of the patriarchy. Look at them the way you looked at Joseph Gould, who was just a human being who was suffering. I don't know enough about him to say he was a good person overall. I mean, I don't know how to define someone as a good person overall. We've all done heinous things. I certainly have. I don't know. But I do know that his heart was in a good place and he did a lot for a community.
It's kind of my core belief, not in art but just in life, that there's more that unites us than divides us, and that we're closer to each other than we are to our governments. I wish people could focus on that more. Talk to someone, you'll find out you have a lot more in common than you don't have in common. We all want the same things for the most part. The core things we want are the same and these divisions that are created only serve capitalism and greed and politicians.
Our conversation concludesin the next part discussing her short story collection, Widow Fantasies, which will be posted soon. Read the start of our conversation discussing her memoir, Fuse, here.
Rebellion Box is available for purchase directly from Radiant Press as well as your local bookstore. Follow Hollay Ghadery on Instagram to stay up to date on her latest projects or contact her if you have any questions.
The interview was recorded using Google Meet in May 2025.
Transcription edited by Matthew Long.
All photos are the property of Hollay Ghadery.